I am very grateful to the organizers of
Shanghai Forum for inviting me to attend this grand event. Over the years of
continuous development, Shanghai Forum grows bigger and bigger and enables us
to have the opportunity to share insights together every year in the city. I am
very honored to have such an opportunity to exchange ideas with everybody here.
This is my first visit to Shanghai since I ended my ten-year presidential term.
I am very pleased to be here to see my Chinese friends. Thank you very much for
your kindness and friendliness to Indonesia.

First of all I want to say that the
bilateral relation between Indonesia and China is solid and durable. And the
friendly cooperative partnership between us is deepening. Historically,
bilateral relations have had experienced ups and downs, but since 2005, the
first year I started my first presidential term, the bilateral ties have
entered a new era- we established a strategic cooperative partnership. After
that, we continued strengthening and expanding our partnership. I believe that
our new president JOKO WIDODO is also committed to keeping strengthening the
friendly relations between our two countries.

The theme of this forum is about economic
globalization and Asian choice, and the subtitle is interconnection and
innovation. These themes come at the right time for us. Asia economy is on the
track of continuous development, and the economic globalization is deepening.
In this context we hold such a forum to observe the latest trends in Asia. We
look forward to a better, sustainable development in the region, and the
establishment of a Common Destiny of Communities that would ensure that Asia -
an engine of global economic growth - will play a positive role to in global
economy in the long term.

Before we discuss the problems and
challenges Asia faces, I would like to tell you about my vision of global
developments. I think 2016 is a year full of challenges for all the countries,
we will find large turmoil of global geopolitics and economies this year, and
the fallouts will ripple through far beyond. Only when our cooperation is based
on strategic mutual trust, can we continue on the road of development. Security
issues need to be further addressed throughout the region. New challenges will
emerge one after one. However, we can still create new opportunities while
facing such challenges. I believe that many Asian countries, including the
Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and even Australia, will continue making their
own contributions to the course.

Compared to last year, our economy has been
recovering. But this year, we can also see the IMF's dim outlook of the world
economy, where the IMF deems the time of overall economic slowdown is too long
that would result in new challenges. It said the global economy could only make
a 3.2% growth, and the new normal becomes constantly grilled across the board.
In this context, the new challenges mean that our unemployment rate would keep
high, economic growth would be still depressed, and in many regions the growth
could be less than 1%. In the economic development, we often encounter factors
impacting sustainable development.

Of course, many of the ASEAN countries will
maintain high growth that could reach 4.7%. And economies in some countries,
including Burma and Vietnam, may grow faster than the pace of six other ASEAN
countries. But, in the process of the economic development, we can also see how
difficult it is to make a decision during which we may additionally encounter
lots of uncertain factors emerging in front of us. For example, we need to
consider whether China’s economy could maintain high growth, while I of course
believe that China's economy will still continue developing. We are also very
concerned about other issues, for example, which candidates will eventually win
this year's US presidential election, can we make progress in fighting against
ISIS, and what trends would terrorism develop. So for us, there will be a lot
of things that are out of our expectation. Any developments could change
rapidly. These uncertain factors could cause a very big challenge throughout
the entire region. In this context, for the Asian countries, we must understand
their current situation, and we hope our young people and our universities to
make more thoughts on these issues.

We hope that more and more people can be
from a strategic level to discuss Asia's political and economic development in
the future. And at the same time, we also hope that people from generation to
generation can know our times better and grasp developments happened in our
era. In fact, for us, there are a lot of forces that can develop and shake up
Asia. First, we believe, we should take economic development as one of our core
missions, and the whole society should also take it as a cohesive force for
further development. In addition, we should not only need to make contributions
and improvements politically and economically, but also make breakthroughs in
terms of our thoughts.

We can see that development of cities and
economies are closely linked to growth of income. According to the Asian
Development Bank, it is expected by 2025 there will be additionally 30 billion
people who will immigrate to cities; this is a new trend in urbanization. We
can see that now in Latin America, and some other developing countries, there
will be a great number of poverty population immigrating into cities. That is
to say, we need to work helping the three billion poor people out of poverty
after they come into cities. I believe that in Asia, there will be more and
more entrepreneurs to emerge in the future. In this hall, we can also see a
steady increase in the number of entrepreneurs who I believe will continue to
promote development of the society as a whole. I believe entrepreneurship is a
very important driving force to push for development of the whole society, help
us resolve risks, so that we can do more things and input more resources to
help innovations. We need to continue encouraging faster development of the
whole society during our putting focus on innovation, and it is especially so
for China.

President Xi had said that in the economic
new normal, one of the very important pillars is innovation. And he talked
about that if we can effectively use innovative thinking, we will be able to
play out our advantage of human resources to a greater extent. For Indonesia,
during the whole 10 golden years, we also placed innovation as our most
important priority. Innovation can lay a solid foundation for the future, and
can make more harmonious and speedy development. As long as the
entrepreneurship can continue promoting innovations, it can make natural
resources be more wisely used. During the economic development, social
inclusion should be encouraged and environmental protection should be carried
out in sync with economic development. They are also foundation for green and
sustainable development.

We strongly agree with the idea of
development with environmental protection and inclusiveness. In the production
process, we should encourage lower costs, and faster and more environmentally
friendly approaches. At the same time, China has so many ambitious
entrepreneurs who can not only help improve living standards of the
communities, but also enhance equality of the whole society. I believe that
entrepreneurship has become the most important force in driving development in
Asia. Another important development driving force is connectivity. In the 20th
century, what countries cared most is their sovereignty; but in the 21st
century, we care more about interconnection, interworking and interoperability.
We always need to think about how far we made in our interconnection and interworking
with the outside world. We need interconnection with global markets, with
others’ ideas, and with others’ infrastructure. So I have to emphasize the
power of interconnection is very crucial.

In my country, poverty people not only
lacks of economic means, but also feel very isolated and helpless, rendering
them having to accept their miserable fate. But interconnection can help them
change their fate. For a poor man, they are now given more power to change.
They can contact others quite smoothly, because they can use social networking
tools and email. Through the digitalization, the poor will have more ability to
reach the rest of the world. Many young people in the Middle East are in
poverty and out of job, so during the "Arab Spring" unrest, they became
the first batch of a lost generation. In the development of the whole regional
economy, it needs a common participation of Asian countries, so that we can
become stronger and improve the Asian economies as a whole.

I had been thinking the spirit of nationalism
when I served as president of Indonesia. If a country is eager for sound
development, it is necessary to break shackles of nationalism, and should be
more inclusive and extensional to much wider regions. We cannot even clinch to
regionalism; we should not put our focus just on Asia, because we cannot
isolate ourselves in Asia. We should promote strategic cooperation with other
regions, including with the European Union.

The developments in Southeast Asia shows a
little better, the ASEAN member countries have been expanded from five to ten
throughout the Southeast Asia. The participating member countries of ASEAN have
become a community of destiny, whether it is judged from the aspects of the
nation's destiny, the national awareness, and identity and other aspects, it
has already had quite a high degree of consensus. ASEAN countries must
establish more security measures, and contribute more for integration and
interconnection with the rest of the world. In China’s "Belt and
Road" initiative, Southeast Asia will benefit, which also requires the
ASEAN countries to enhance their construction, and strengthen stability of the
regional economy. Healthy growth throughout the region will be conducive to the
healthy development of the world economy, and plays out a farreaching
significance as a world economy booster.

In this forum, I would like to appeal for
further strengthening the integration of regions.

First, in the Asian region, we must
strengthen cooperation and create a community of common destiny throughout
Asia. At the same time, we also hope that the whole Asia, including the ASEAN,
can move further towards stability and security. In the new era of the 21st
century, we need to make full preparations to cope with challenges in terms of
thoughts, actions, and the economic and political means. We sure will encounter
new problems and challenges ahead, and we are confident we can solve these
problems - as long as we can change our mindset, and use of the thinking of
cooperation, we can achieve a joint solution to address the problems and
challenges.

Second, we must further strengthen the
cooperation basis and cooperation infrastructure, in particular to establish a
consensus of Common Destiny of Communities among all stakeholders. We must
continue to focus on the same old issues, that is, how to establish a mutual
trust, mutual understanding, communication and interconnection mechanism, so to
bring different development tracks of different countries onto the same
foundations of strategic trust and cooperation. Such cooperation and growth
must be based on dialogue and exchange mechanisms that have been carried out
fruitfully. And stable mutual respect should also become an important basis for
us to solve future problems. There are many countries which are more advanced
in mobilizing assets and in mental preparation than other countries, and we
need to continue to strengthen balanced and coordinated development in this
regard.

Third, we must build higher
self-confidence, believing our strength can continue to solve potential
challenges. I have shared with you my vision of the future of Asia, that is,
the future of Asia would certainly be better than now. I am optimistic that the
future of Asia will continue to success and prosperity, and continue to move towards
peace. However, this future would not easily come by just with our fingertips,
we must continue to strengthen cooperation and regional integration; we must
continuously contribute our efforts and hard works. If you do not strengthen
regional integration, it is likely we would lose the going-forward momentum for
which we have got lots of failure cases and examples, and this prognosis might
come true in the short term, and we are likely to make the achievements we have
achieved go down the drain. We need keep our long-lasting fights and maintain
our high-spirited will, and we should rely on our continued integration work to
push Asia to make real and sustainable development in the global competition.

So I here finally would like to
re-emphasize that we must strengthen cooperation, join hands to consolidate
regional integration in Asia and build a solid foundation for the future.